John B. Davis

In line with his commitment to Veblenian thinking and agency-structure reasoning, Geoff Hodgson rejects the subjectivist conception of individuals as collections of preferences and views individuals in objectivist terms as distinguishable sets of habits that co-evolve with cumulative change in social structures and institutions. The chapter draws on these ideas to propose an account of reflexive economic agents that explains choice behavior in a cumulative causation world, in which both linear causation and circular feedback effects matter. Reflexive agents know that their actions can influence their habits and alter the basis for future action, and therefore form expectations about the consequences of their actions not only on the external world but also on themselves. But reflexive agents are reference-dependent and biased toward the habits they already have, with the implication that they are not only distinguishable but also re-identifiable over time.

Edited by Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes

John B. Davis

Moore’s early role in Cambridge philosophy and connections to Russell, Wittgenstein, and Keynes are described. His influence on Keynes’s early views is associated with Moore’s naturalistic fallacy idea and his open-question argument method of analysis. Moore and Keynes disagreed about how duty was to be explained owing to their differences over how the concept of probability was to be understood. Moore held a frequency view and Keynes believed probability was a matter of rational judgement. In his later “My early beliefs” memoir Keynes affirmed his attachment to Moore’s understanding of the good as what is intrinsically valuable and demurred from his view of duty and as conduct. Conventions were seen as central to the latter.